Alex Ooley (00:03)
Hello and welcome to the Forge of Freedom podcast. I'm your host, Alex Uli, and this is episode 191 of the Forge of Freedom. Today I'm thrilled to have Christina Dent with us on the show. Christina is an author, a TEDx speaker, and a relentless question asker who challenges us to rethink our approach to drugs and addiction. A conservative Christian from Mississippi with a degree in biblical studies from Belle Haven University,

Christina once viewed addiction through a lens of moral absolutes. But when she and her husband became foster parents in 2014, her perspective shifted dramatically. Meeting a mother struggling with addiction and caring for her infant son gave Christina a front row seat to the human toll of addiction and our drug laws. This experience sparked a journey of reading, questioning, and listening, leading her to found End It For Good.

a nonprofit dedicated to health-centered drug policies. In her book, Curious, A Foster Mom's Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction, Christina shares the research and personal stories that transformed her views, inviting us all to explore solutions that prioritize human dignity in thriving communities. Her unique perspective as a conservative Christian advocating for reform offers fresh insight

and think you'll enjoy the perspectives she has to offer. Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Dent (01:37)
Thanks Alex, I'm so excited to be here.

Alex Ooley (01:39)
Yeah, as we were talking pre-show, you know that I heard about you and your work ⁓ through your podcast on the Bob Murphy show, which was not too long ago. I don't recall exactly when it was published. ⁓ But I heard your discussion with him and thought, man, I just relate to this so deeply because I practice law, criminal defense primarily, but I also represent parents in cases ⁓ that involve the Department of Child Services. So I've had a...

sort of a front row seat to the ⁓ destruction and the, think the unintended consequences of the war on drugs and drug policy and drug laws that most people I don't think realize is happening. And so I thought your perspective was a fresh one. I often discuss the war on drugs on this podcast from a philosophical perspective, from an economic perspective, but you really do a good job of bringing the human element.

bear. as I was reading your book, the stories that you told in it were really impactful and ⁓ got out sort of sussed out the economic and philosophical and religious aspects, but really the stories told the human element. And with that, if you would start out, if you could tell us a little bit about how you got interested enough in this issue to start a nonprofit, end it for good, and write your book.

Christina Dent (03:06)
Absolutely. Never thought I would be doing this. Honestly, the first time I heard somebody say, know, do you think drugs should be legal? I just thought they had lost their mind. I it was I could not even enter the realm of a conversation. I just left the room. It just was so crazy to me. So I am a born and raised Mississippian, grew up here my whole life in a wonderful family, wonderful church community, ⁓ conservative and

in all the ways you can be just about. I was homeschooled kindergarten through high school and just kind of grew up in a little bit of a bubble. But I liked a lot of it that way. I liked kind of the you make the right decisions and you do the right thing and things work out for you. And so my own life to me kind of proved this black and white way of thinking of, you do this and this happens, do that and that happens. You just make

good decisions and things will work out for you. So I went to college. Like you said, I have a degree in Bible and I really didn't come up against any anywhere that brought this issue to bear in my life until I was in my thirties when my husband and I started fostering. I never used drugs while I was in high school or college. I wasn't drinking. I just, it just was not of interest to me. And so I didn't think about it. ⁓

And I just took in what the culture told me about it. And conservative Christian culture of the 80s and 90s was drugs are bad, people who use drugs are bad, addiction is bad, people struggling with addiction are bad. There just wasn't a lot of nuance in that. And I didn't have anything else really speaking to me about it. And so I took that into foster care and didn't, in my mind, how could someone who loved their children be using drugs?

⁓ Certainly, how could someone who was pregnant be using drugs if they love their child? So I didn't have a category for that until I met the mom of one of our foster sons and began to see in her that she's a mom like me.

Alex Ooley (05:18)
Yeah, and you tell the story in your book of Joanne and her son, I hope it's okay that I use their names, in Beckham, and you tell a story about going to meet her and you park in the parking lot and you see a woman ⁓ running across the parking lot and you realize that it's her and that she's coming to meet. And in that moment, you had this sort of realization that this is not

Christina Dent (05:26)
Yep, absolutely.

Alex Ooley (05:47)
some other type of person, like this is an actual person, this is not a drug addict or an anti-social person of any kind. It's a real human being who cares for her children like most mothers would. Can you tell us a little bit about that and ⁓ maybe a little bit about the—because that's not where it started for you, right, this transformation in your thinking. Can you tell us about that encounter?

and how your thoughts started to evolve from this sort of black and white, ⁓ good versus bad, and ⁓ sort of the perspective that this is really a health challenge and not a legal challenge.

Christina Dent (06:32)
Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, I would love to say that I had that experience of her running across the parking lot, crying, so excited to see her son. And my heart was filled with delight and I thought, wow, this is amazing. What a wonderful person. But really anything that butts up against something that we have believed for a long time, all of us have a knee jerk reaction to try to discount it. It's much easier to discount a new idea than it is to actually wrestle with it. And

determine if it's true and then if it is true, how is that going to settle with all of my current beliefs and values and what is that going to require of me if I kind of let that belief into my belief system? So I had that just like everybody else does. Maybe I had it to a greater degree. My husband still tells me sometimes my spiritual gift is judgmentalness. certainly something that is a work in progress for me.

Alex Ooley (07:25)
This is the

Christina Dent (07:30)
⁓ but so I saw her and you know, my immediate thought Alex is, you know, this is, this is a staged, this is kind of to make her look good. This is to try to get me to put a good word in with the social worker. This like, I don't know how to process this, if this is true, because in my mind, she doesn't love her child as much as I love my kids. And I'm seeing this level of expression of love that

was over anything that I had even ever done. It was just this raw affection, this raw desire to be with her son for every moment that she could be. ⁓ my own pride just felt like, I don't know, could I let someone else see that kind of vulnerability in me? And so it was easier to kind of discount that. But I got to know her. ⁓

She had an hour visitation with him. She went to inpatient drug treatment after that. And then she would call me from drug treatment and say, ⁓ can you tell me what has he done today? And she'd call every day. ⁓ How much is he eating? How much is he sleeping? She wanted all the information. And then she would ask me to put her on speakerphone. And she would sing to him over the phone. And that experience over and over again of talking with a mom who

was like my friends. She was like me. Wanted to know all the same things we talked about, about our kids when they were babies. Wanted to be there for all the things that we wanted to be there for. She sent me this little, in Mississippi we call them lovies, like a animal, stuffed animal rag sort of thing. And she had been sleeping with it. And she sent it to me and she said, can you please put this by him so that he can still like smell me?

even though I'm not with him. Things like that that are, my mind immediately goes back to the hospital where I ask the nurses, hey, can you bathe my son in the room with me so that I'm not separated from him so he can be with me. All these things that just kept whispering to me, this is a mom like you, this is a mom like you. And finally I was able to reckon.

with that and admit, yes, this is a mom like me, which means I have misunderstood something really important about addiction, the type of people who struggle with it, what's really going on there. And that opened the door of what if we've misunderstood drugs entirely? What if our policies are based on beliefs that aren't actually true?

Alex Ooley (10:11)
And so this sort of repeated interaction with Joanne is what sort of proved to you, I suppose, right, that this wasn't just a put-on or a fake to try to have you put in a good word with, I don't know what the department's called in Mississippi, it's called the Department of Child Services in Indiana. ⁓ But it was clear to you after these repeated interactions anyway that this was a genuine love that she had for her son.

Christina Dent (10:40)
Yep, absolutely.

Alex Ooley (10:41)
Yeah.

So how long did that relationship, I suppose you may still have some communication with Joanne and Beckham, but how long was it before she and Beckham were reunited? ⁓

Christina Dent (10:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great question. And yes, we are still in contact. And when you asked earlier about using their names, she's very public about our story. And she's always telling me, Christina, tell the story. Like, this is, we want people to know, we want them to see this. We want them to see the hope. We want them to see, you know, for us, both of us are Christians. And so what God has done in this situation and how He has changed both of us through it. So,

they were reunited only about a month after he came to us, which is so interesting. Like we had this child for a month. We've had that relationship now for nine and a half years, but it is crazy how much your life can change by something that happens in a pretty short amount of time. So Joanne had actually found a treatment center. There's only a couple of them in the whole state that have on-site childcare for

moms or dads who want to go to treatment but have children who are younger than school age. And so she was able to find a bed in one of those treatment centers, it was a couple hours away. She went there and then the judge allowed her after a month of her being in treatment to be able to bring Beckham there with her so that she could have him there. And he has been with her ever since. was there with her. He would go to the nursery during the day while she would go to her classes and therapy and...

all of those things. And then in the evenings, they were together and they stayed in kind of dorm style ⁓ housing right there on site and had the support to help her learn to parent well. And she would be the first to say when she was in active addiction, she was not a safe place for him to have grown up. She would say it was the right thing for ⁓ here at Mississippi Child Protection Services to come in and ⁓

to take him into foster care because that would not have been healthy if he had been with her while she was still ⁓ using. And yet he had an ability to get back to her really quickly. And so that bond could be solidified instead of being broken in those really crucial first year of life. And for her, she would say it was her motivation every day waking up. There is her son right next to her and she is reminded.

Alex Ooley (13:00)
What the?

Christina Dent (13:18)
this is why I'm doing this hard work. This is what I'm working for. Instead of first I've got to do this and I'm separated from my kids and then I got to go through the whole process of figuring out how to get them back. ⁓ So yeah, it was a really beautiful thing that I wish was more available. You when I first heard that there was a treatment center with childcare on site, boy, I really thought, you know, the world was blowing up. Like I could not, this was still in my... ⁓

very stigmatized way of thinking about people struggling with addiction. And I just thought, that's so insane. Who thinks this is a good idea? And now I think, my gosh, why can't we have so many more of these that understand that family support dynamic, ⁓ not just helping that bond to form, but helping people in early recovery navigate the challenges of parenting without the use of substances. Things like that, that it's really hard if people are maybe in treatment.

when all of the stressors of life have been removed and then suddenly they're back at their home and all those stressors are back in and there's not kind of that support system to bridge that. So it can be so powerful and helpful and healing on so many levels to have a more family centered approach to treatment.

Alex Ooley (14:30)
Well, that's amazing, the story. I don't think you mentioned it if you did. I apologize in the book that it was only a month ⁓ before Joanne and Beckham were reunited, and it was just that month of interaction with her that really forced you to reconsider ⁓ these sort of firmly held beliefs that you'd had for 30 years nearly. I mean, you were in your early 30s at this point, right? So, ⁓

Christina Dent (14:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Alex Ooley (14:57)
It's amazing and it's really a testament to you too that you had the humility to reconsider your beliefs ⁓ based on your ⁓ experience and what you observed through Joanne. And know, some people might chalk this up to, know, well, this is an outlier. This isn't what happens in every case. And that's sometimes true, but this is not unusual, right, for ⁓ somebody like Joanne to...

find the support she needs and to get the help she needs to ⁓ reunify with her child or her family or to simply just improve their life and find purpose whether or not they have children.

Christina Dent (15:40)
Yeah,

absolutely. There is no guaranteed outcome. And I think that's an important point. This is not, what Joanne was able to do and she's doing great today. Everyone can do that. That's not going to always end up that way. But as I began to learn, this one month experience opened the door of my mind and then it was a year and a half of wrestling through trying to learn and oh my goodness, this is so challenging to rethink this issue. And yet,

being able to kind of have that space to do that and also being able to think about that there are no guarantees except if we were to arrest her and put her in prison. We know what the outcome is going to be then. Beckham's going to grow up without a mom. He's already in a single parent family and Joanne is going to be in prison. That's not going to help her deal with her addiction. Drugs are readily available in prisons and jails. So they're going to come out.

let's say 10 years down the road because she was using illegal drugs at the time. And she's probably going to be far more deeply traumatized after 10 years in prison. She's going to have all sorts of barriers to rebuilding her life. Her son is going to be half grown by that point. there's, yes, there's no guarantee if we approach her substance use in a very health centered, family centered way. But there's at least an opportunity. There's an opportunity for them to be able to.

get the help that she needed and to build that family life. And that's ultimately what we did. We need more opportunities. There are no guarantees if we can give up that dream of a world with guarantees and be open to what gives us the best opportunity.

Alex Ooley (17:19)
Yeah, I mean, you touch on this in your book that, you know, we live in a fallen world and the world's not perfect. Life isn't perfect. And there are certainly ⁓ downsides to legalization of drugs and criminalization of drugs. But what I mention to people often in private conversations is that, you know, just like you're saying, the only guarantee is that if she'd been put in jail, she would not have been reunified with her son, right?

She may not have been able to ⁓ grapple with her addiction. ⁓ But part of the rationale for the, for laws against drugs, for the war on drugs is that using drugs is bad and we have to punish it. We have to send a signal to people that they shouldn't do this thing ⁓ because the drugs might destroy their life. Right? So what we're saying is by punish, by punishing drug use, drug possession,

⁓ We're guaranteeing that it's going to ruin their life. It's not that it might ruin their life like the drugs will. We're guaranteeing that it will by putting them in prison or jail. ⁓ So it's sort of a strange sort of cognitive dissonance to some degree. And not only that, we're going to punish the supposed victim in these cases, because I would consider drug possession a victimless crime.

And in Indiana on police reports, if a victim is listed in a drug case, it's listed as society. But who's paying for the punishment? It's not just the person who's being incarcerated, right? It's the taxpayer who's paying to incarcerate them and pay for their incarceration. So it's sort of a double punishment with a guarantee that you're going to ruin this person's life rather than the possibility that they might get the help they need through a more health centric approach.

Christina Dent (19:16)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Ooley (19:16)
⁓ Do you have any thoughts on that before we move on? ⁓

Christina Dent (19:20)
I love that point. is,

I think what we're missing so much of this conversation is that we've never really pushed the conclusions to their limits, I guess. A lot of times we just stop with, there's, you know, she might not have stayed sober. Well, I have a cousin who didn't stay sober, so there you go. Well, sure. But to your point, yeah, drugs can ruin your life. A criminal record is definitely going to. Like that's, you get a felony.

Alex Ooley (19:39)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christina Dent (19:49)
you're going to have trouble finding a place, apartment you can rent, finding a job that actually pays for you to eat. I mean, there's the life destruction that happens there is an absolute guarantee. ⁓ And it is odd. It's odd that we approach it that way. It's also odd that now we know that one of the main drivers of addiction is trauma and people are self-medicating. ⁓

for that and yet we're using an approach that is intended to traumatize people. The criminal justice system is designed to inflict trauma on a person's life. So sometimes that is the unavoidable outcome. You have someone who's a danger to society, they need to be separated from society. But that really is what the criminal justice system is good for, is separating people from society. It is an incredibly traumatic place for people to be.

all kinds of abuse in all kinds of ways that happen to people while they are incarcerated. ⁓ Not to mention just the separation from family and connections and all of that. So we're using trauma to try to address a problem that is made worse by trauma. We're using punishment to try to punish people out of something they use because they're

they're hurting or they want to feel better and we're thinking that maybe making them feel worse will stop making them want to feel better. It is so backwards, but we don't take the time to think about it because we've been told over and over again, just be afraid, just be afraid of drugs. And the human brain, when it is afraid, can't rationalize, it can't learn, it can't really ⁓ think through things. It goes into fight, flight, freeze mode. So if we're going to just

be afraid every time we think about drugs, we're never gonna actually figure out solutions, we're just going to react. And that's what we've been doing for decades, a lot of reacting, very little solutions. We need to put that fear on the shelf and look at what is actually happening, what's causing the harm, how can we reduce that harm, and that's how we're gonna get to better solutions.

Alex Ooley (21:53)
My wife is a physician assistant and we often identify parallels between the legal system and the medical system. And I view this as one of those parallels where so often doctors will try to treat their patients with medications and they're treating the symptoms but they're not treating the underlying cause, right? And oftentimes, and that's not true in all cases, but oftentimes it's nutrition. It's the...

the things that you're putting into your body that are causing problems with the system as a whole and treating the symptom is not going to fix the underlying problem. And I think that's what we're doing by punishing drug crimes to your point that we're punishing a symptom of the problem, which is some internal trauma or lack of purpose or meaning that the person has and they're trying to fill that void by using illegal drugs.

Christina Dent (22:49)
Yep, absolutely.

And that really is the thing you asked a while ago about kind of what prompted this starting of an organization. It's not because I care about drugs. I still haven't used an illegal drug. I drink about four drinks a year. It is still nothing that I am personally interested in. And yet, I'm really interested in people.

And as a believer, that's a big part of the kind of theology of my life and understanding of the world is that people are incredibly important and valuable and what happens to them we are responsible for if we have influence over that. And the more that I learned about the root causes of addiction, the more it just broke my heart because the people who have in many cases already suffered the most among us are the people who are suffering even more.

It's kind of like this cycle of suffering that they're the, the mechanism they're trying to use to self-medicate for that suffering may not be healthy, but they're trying to do the thing that ⁓ makes them feel okay. Actually, I had lunch on, ⁓ had coffee on Monday with a friend of mine and I've met him through this work and he was, we were talking about, ⁓ he works kind of in an adjacent field and we ended up

He mentioned, he said that the first time that I tried cocaine, I felt safe. Just for the first time in my life, I just felt like wrapped in this safety and like everything was okay. And that's not what the drug war tells you people are going for when they're using cocaine. It's they want to be crazy. They just want to break the rules. They don't even care. If you talk to people who have struggled with an addiction,

The way they describe that substance use is often like for the first time I felt safe or for the first time I felt, I have another friend who described it as it was like the world, like everything was sort of ⁓ rose tinted glasses. Like instead of always feeling like everything was off, it felt like everything was okay. ⁓ Or it felt like a big hug. I've heard that many times. It felt like when I used heroin that I was being wrapped in this warm.

That's a powerful experience. And for people who have not had that ⁓ or who for whatever reason are struggling to feel that today, they might have grown up in a loving family, but there's all kinds of mental health issues we can struggle with, loneliness, lack of purpose, all kinds of things that can make us want to change the way that we feel. And drugs offer a powerful experience of that that can turn ⁓ really negative if we aren't. ⁓

very careful with that or find better coping solutions.

Alex Ooley (25:38)
Yeah, it's a coping mechanism. It's an escape from the reality that they experience while they're sober. it's ⁓ like we talked about it, it sort of fills a void that they have in their life that's often caused by some traumatic experience. And speaking of which, you talk about this ⁓ experiment in your book called Rat Park. It's an experiment by Bruce Alexander. Could you tell us a little bit about the Rat Park experiment?

Christina Dent (26:06)
Yes, I love this because for me as someone who has not had a bachelor's degree, but I'm not a particularly academic person. And so I love like ⁓ something I can visualize in my mind to help me understand what's actually going on with addiction. So he was a researcher, ⁓ doctor in a PhD sort of way. And he was working at an addiction clinic because he was made to kind of coming out of medical school and he was scared. He thought these are crazy people. I don't want to be working here.

And yet what he found is that they had really interesting stories and he could see himself making the same decisions that they had made if he had been given their life circumstances. So as he heard their stories, he thought, wow, this makes perfect sense why they would be using heroin. think I probably would have been too. And so he went back and he was also teaching at a university. so he went back and told his students what he was experiencing. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, this can't be true because they've done these experiments with rats and you.

give rats the opportunity to take drug laced water and they'll just use it and use it and use it until they die. The drugs cause the addiction and the drugs are the problem. And so he and some of his colleagues created what they called Rat Park because he thought about rats and thought, well, in those first experiments, they put rats by themselves in small little cages with nothing to do. They were in isolation. The only thing they could do was choose either this regular

water or the drug laced water. And rats are really social. They're like humans in a lot of ways. And so they built Rat Park and they put lots of rats in it and it had toys in it and it had all the things that make rats happy in life. And they put the drug laced water and they put the regular water. And what they found is that the rats played happily most of the time. Most of the time they chose the regular water, not the drug laced water. And if they chose it, they only used it

⁓ now and then. They never used it in excess. They never overdosed on it. They never became compulsive users of it. And so he spent the next 50 years of his career, this was in kind 70s and 80s, he spent ⁓ the next 50 years of his career pursuing that idea of, I think we have radically misunderstood the role that drugs play versus the role that the context of a person's life plays and that really the drugs are

as you said, a solution attempt, not the actual problem. And yes, they may have some physical, physically addicting components to them, but why do so many people use drugs and not become addicted? Because the context of their life ⁓ has them in a place where they can change the way they feel now and then, and they're okay with most of their life being sober. And for some people,

their life sober feels like a negative 50. And to get to even back to a zero where they just feel like I can make it through the day is to be medicated in some way, to be numbed in some way. And so it's not, you'll hear a lot of people in addiction say, I used drugs for a little while to feel great. And then I use them just not to feel like I was gonna die. ⁓ And

who wants to feel like they're going to die? None of us do. We're all trying to not feel that way. ⁓ And so it became much more understandable to me why this would have such a significant hold on people if the choice was to feel like you're going to die or the choice was to use. ⁓ I may not have had that experience before, but that's a pretty powerful explanation of what could drive someone to make

decisions that are against what they want to do, against their values. Again, they find themselves doing things. They thought, not this person. I wouldn't do this. And yet that human pull to feel okay ⁓ is incredibly powerful.

Alex Ooley (30:13)
to take this opportunity to plug your book again, which is called Curious, A Foster Mom's Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction, where you talk about this Rat Park experiment, but you also mention ⁓ part of the influence, and I think where you learned about this experiment was from Chasing the Scream, a book by Johann Hari. And I became familiar with Johann Hari through a TED Talk.

And of course you gave one as well and I'll link to your book as well as your Ted talk and the website for end it for good in the show notes. But I'll also link to Yohan Hari's book, Chasing the Scream and his Ted talk, which I believe I'm blanking on the name of right now. I think it's called everything you think you know about addiction is wrong. Yeah. And those were incredibly powerful. in addition to your book, those were incredibly powerful. ⁓

Christina Dent (31:02)
That's it.

Alex Ooley (31:12)
material in shaping my views on the war on drugs. ⁓ Can you tell us a little bit, if you would, about Chasing the Scream and how that book influenced you? Was it primarily the Rat Park experiment or did it influence you in other ways?

Christina Dent (31:28)
Yeah, so I read that book during this kind of year and a half of learning journey ⁓ after I met Joanne. I had heard of the book before that and I thought, I have no interest in this. Why do I care about drug policy? I don't use drugs. don't want to. I like to read, but why would I want to read a book about that? ⁓ So I had had no interest in reading it. And it wasn't until I met Joanne that then I came back around to it and thought, maybe there's something here for me. ⁓ And so I read that as well as lots of other things, talking to people, trying to

to build up this knowledge of what have I missed all these years. And I found that to be the best resource during that learning journey because it's got 30 pages of citation notes at the end of it. It's very well researched, but it is all told through stories. And that had a big influence on when I wrote my book because I ended up meeting Johan as part of this journey of starting into for good and all of the things that we've done.

And when I was thinking about writing the book, asked him, should I like, you've already written a book on this. I don't know that there's anything more that I can add to this. And he said, absolutely there is because ⁓ he is coming from a non-faith. He's not a person of faith. He's an atheist. He's coming from a much more progressive perspective personally, even though he tries to write Chasing the Scream pretty neutrally. ⁓ And so here I am coming from a conservative perspective and I'm a person of faith.

So I wrote curious because even after I finished chasing the scream, I thought, okay, now I understand a lot of what's happened over the last 100 years with drug policy. Why did we make some drugs illegal? What's been the result in places that have tried to roll that back? And I understood more of the societal collateral damage.

that we were paying for even if we don't recognize it, not just in money, but in lost lives, destroyed families, all sorts of things that people purport to care about across the political spectrum. And so ⁓ when I came back, came to the end of that book, there was still this kind of lingering question in my mind just wondering, are those conclusions that he comes to

Are they his conclusions only because he is more progressive and he's not a person of faith? And that really for me was a wrestling. And so I made this whole spreadsheet of pros and cons of drug legalization versus prohibition. And what did I think? And I ended up writing Curious because I wanted to provide a shorter read that really was trying to take such a complex issue and bring it down in a simple way.

that can also help people of faith and people who lean more conservative to think through how do those values inform them on this issue. And I'm happy that it has done that for a lot of people. I met with someone yesterday who said, I've read your book twice now and I think you're right on some things and I think I don't agree with you on other things, but I'm not sure I don't agree with you. just, very, it's a very different way of thinking of it. And I,

you know, this, you know, it an older woman who's lived in the South her whole life, very similar background to mine. And so, you know, she's coming in with decades and decades of similar kind of thought process that I used to have. So it's really encouraging and inviting people to have a different, have an open mind and to learn and then to come to their own conclusions. And I try to leave that door open for them to land where they do. But chasing the scream was really helpful to me because it helped me to see that

I think one of the main things that was helpful for us to see that a hundred years ago when we started this experiment of prohibition, it wasn't based on evidence then. It's not based on evidence now and it wasn't based on it then. And I think I had always thought drugs have always been illegal. they're just, that's like their default is just being illegal. And I had never known that there was a time where even harder drugs, know, quote unquote harder drugs like heroin and cocaine were legal and were able to be gotten in low dose

quantities over the counter and that just blew my mind and that really started me thinking on Yes, the world is a different place than it was a hundred years ago But if there wasn't evidence then for what we did and there's not evidence now for what we're doing Perhaps the reason we're still doing it is because none of us lived in the time before and we are Just taking what was given to us and continuing on with it instead of saying wait a second

that we might have been wrong. Maybe this is one of our generation's blind spots and maybe it's one of the things that we need to rethink.

Alex Ooley (36:19)
I want to get into this question about why should people like you and I who have no interest in drugs care about this issue and sort of the broader impacts of the war on drugs and why just ordinary people who don't use drugs, don't know anybody who uses drugs, why they should care about it. But I love your point about the person who read your book and agrees with some of your points, but maybe not some of the others, but they're not sure yet. And you mentioned just leaving the door open.

And I really love that point because I think that there's a lot of ⁓ overlap here in just trying to evangelize to people in general, no matter what the topic is. If it's Christianity, if it's ⁓ drugs, if it's some other topic, you're not going to change their mind by beating them over the head with statistics and facts, right? And I love that that Johann Hari shaped your approach to your book.

through a storytelling sort of lens or approach, because I think that telling those stories, I think helps reach people in a more impactful way than just bombarding them with facts and economic data or philosophical arguments. So I really like that approach and appreciate your book for that reason, among others.

But the other thing, I want to get into this topic and you alluded to the age of the war on drugs, right? Alluding back to the prohibition of alcohol. I want to get into that a little bit, but I want to address this question. Why should people like you and I who don't care about drugs, don't use drugs, why should we care about the war on drugs?

Christina Dent (38:11)
So that is my passion, Alex, because it's the thing that keeps me going. And it's the reason why the hard work of the nonprofit world and working on a difficult issue like this is worth it. Because when I think about ⁓ changing drug policies, what is always in front of me is this affects every person in the world, whether they recognize it or not. None of us recognize. ⁓

Alex Ooley (38:13)
Thank

Christina Dent (38:39)
we don't realize the blanket of harm that is covering the world. And I say the world, not hyperbolically, like it is the drug trafficking trade impacts almost every country in many different ways, always negatively. ⁓ To some countries it has gone far enough that there is just rampant violence from the underground market.

Their political systems have been completely destabilized by the money that gets funneled to criminal organizations through drug trafficking. ⁓ That's a function of underground markets. That's a choice we've made to empower and financially incentivize and reward people who break the law by selling drugs. So that harm is going to fall ⁓ on the weakest

places where there's the least ability to enforce the rule of law. So you have the most ⁓ vulnerable people are most likely to be the ones paying the heaviest price because it's just easiest to conduct criminal business in places where it's easy to not have the law enforced. ⁓ That's also true for people struggling with addiction. So some of the most vulnerable in terms of ⁓ that have endured the most.

in society, whether that is through a difficult childhood experiences or it's through just the challenges of living in a fallen world and all of us experience that in different ways. ⁓ Those are the people who are being ⁓ arrested and incarcerated and oftentimes the difference between whether or not you end up in jail or not is just do you have the money to pay a fine for your drug possession charge or do you not? And if you don't, then you're going to go to jail.

Alex Ooley (40:29)
Or do you have the money to bond out of jail? Do you have the money to hire an attorney? Do you have the resources to fight your case and defend yourself? And so that's a huge impediment to lots of people.

Christina Dent (40:29)
But

Yes. Yep.

Yep, yep.

Right. So we end up with a very different outcome for the exact same crime, just depending on do you have resources or do you not. And that I think is that's heartbreaking for me as a person. It's heartbreaking as a Christian when the Bible is clear that caring for those who are vulnerable is very close to the heart of God. And so I see it as

Okay, if you care about people going to college and being able to get a degree, drug convictions can eliminate your ability to qualify for loans and grants. So educational opportunity is at risk. Your employment opportunity is at risk. And the trickle down of that is if you care about people being able to economically get ahead and provide for themselves and their families ⁓ without government assistance,

putting up lots of barriers for them to that is not helpful. That doesn't benefit anyone. ⁓ So we have all of these broken families that come from this as parents are incarcerated. And I think we tend to think of incarcerated people as like individuals. We don't think about the fact that they are connected to families, they're connected to communities. ⁓ have a friend that went to go visit a women's correctional facility.

here in Mississippi. And she said, she asked the warden, what would happen if you took out all the women who were here on drug charges? And the warden said, well, the place would close. That's everyone. Like, that's just why people are here. That's, and so you think about all of those women, many of them are mothers. And I can hear people, I could hear them saying right now, but look, they made a bad decision. They chose to break the law. Well, I can agree with you on that.

I'm not saying should we just let people break the law. I'm saying should this be a crime? Is the criminal justice system the right response for this? Because we are paying for generations to come by what we know happens with children when their parents are incarcerated. All of the risk factors that go up for them for negative outcomes. We're paying for it in employability in the economy. We're paying for it in taxpayer money that's being wasted on incarceration of a person.

five years in prison in Mississippi, that's going to cost you $100,000, bare minimum, just to house that person in prison. That's not court costs and healthcare costs and all of the other things that come with that. Yes.

Alex Ooley (43:17)
cost cost to prosecute it, to police

it, cost to provide a public defender if they need one. ⁓ Those are all direct costs and that doesn't even include the secondary or tertiary costs that come with it, like the impact to the family, to the employer, to the community, et cetera. Yeah.

Christina Dent (43:23)
Yes. Yep.

Yep. And all

of us are living with those harms of people that can't get jobs or can't get living wage jobs or can't get an education or can't ⁓ overcome the trauma of their past of having. had a guy that messaged me on LinkedIn and was telling me the story of when his parents were arrested in the middle of the night because they had been caught on some sort of drug charge and how incredibly traumatic that was for him to have the police suddenly in his house.

and then to be at school the next day and everyone in town had heard about it and all of the kids knew about it and he was getting made fun of because his parents had been arrested and now they couldn't go back to work and the work that they had had previously. all of this, all this is happening and we're living with people who have grown up to be adults now and have experienced all kinds of harm that didn't have to happen. We can't reduce all the harm and all the bad experiences that happen in life.

But we are proactively increasing the amount of pain and trauma in millions and millions of people's lives, whether it's through the underground market and the violence that comes from that, or it's through arresting people for drug possession and all of the trauma and disconnection and destabilization that comes through that. And that is a people disaster. And that to me just breaks my heart. And that's why I care about it. And I hope others will also who don't want to.

to use drugs or don't want people using drugs is to see that this is one of the areas in which what we do with drugs has a massive impact on people and how we handle people. And that impacts all of culture and society.

Alex Ooley (45:12)
Yeah. And one of the things that you talk about in your book that I think is important ⁓ is this concept of black markets. And we've alluded, you've alluded to that a little bit already in our conversation, but a lot of people don't, I don't think think about this impact that when you criminalize something that people want, inevitably there will be a black market that develops around that product.

⁓ And that's exactly what's gone on with drugs. That's exactly what happened with alcohol during Prohibition right you had the Al Capone's the Bugs Moran those sorts of people who had organized crime organized gangs around the prohibition of alcohol and People didn't they weren't peddling in beer, right? They were peddling in the highest potency moonshine type alcohol they could because that's what black markets do

It increases the potency of the product to make it easier to smuggle and to get the highest dose of the product to their consumer in the smallest possible package, which is exactly what we're seeing with modern day drugs, whether that's methamphetamine and heroin or fentanyl or carfentanil now and other drugs. there are these, not only is there the

guaranteed cost that we've talked about of incarcerating the person who possesses the drugs versus the potential cost of the harm that might be caused by their using the drugs. There is this secondary effect that in harms that are created by the black markets and that's where a lot of violence stems from, right? You know, one of the common criticisms of legalizing drugs is that, well, these people who use drugs, they're committing crimes, right?

How do you answer that sort of ⁓ objection to legalizing drugs?

Christina Dent (47:13)
I would say, well, the people who are selling drugs right now, we have pushed those drugs into markets where the only way that you can make money is to commit crime. So we are setting up a massive pile of money and you can only get a piece of that money, a piece of that pie if you break the law. And the more violent you are, the more likely you are to get a bigger piece of that pie because it's not ruled by, you can't take your, ⁓

your disagreements to the courts to settle with people like Alex. There are no attorneys in the underground market. You settle it by force. And so we're creating this huge incentive, financial incentive, and we know humans like to make money. Somebody is going to go after that pile of money, which is why you can arrest 100 drug dealers and there's going to be 100 more exactly where they were a few hours later. You can arrest a kingpin and

that's going to probably actually create more violence because there's going to be a vacuum of power and people are going to have to fight amongst themselves for who is going to come out on top to lead that cartel or that gang next. So we have a financial incentive for people to engage in criminal activity when we push a popular substance into a ban, which just pushes it into the underground market. ⁓

But for people who are using drugs and the fear that, wait a second, are we just saying they can go do whatever they want to and there's no prosecution for that? And it for good would say, no, we're talking about drug possession. We're not talking about that they committed assault and they happen to be high, so nothing happens to them. No one is saying that. ⁓ Or let's say they committed theft. Let's say they don't have enough money to fund their addiction. And so they went and

stole some things, we would say that is an appropriate role for the criminal justice system. You have taken someone's property and the criminal justice system should be involved in that. Now, it could be a good opportunity for drug courts to come in in that situation where we don't think drug courts should be involved in drug possession because we don't think people should be arrested for drug possession. But if they're committing a crime that the underlying cause of is addiction,

then that could be a great opportunity for drug courts to say, look, you need to be held accountable in the criminal justice system for this theft, but we recognize the reason you committed that theft is because of this addiction you're trying to fund. So we're gonna allow you to participate in drug court. You can go get the help that you need. You can have the accountability in the criminal justice system that you need, but we're gonna give you an opportunity to deal with the underlying issue instead of just putting you in jail, which isn't going to solve the addiction problem. To me, that's an ideal system.

where people are held accountable for the ways they harm others related to their substance use, but they aren't proactively harmed just because they use the substance.

Alex Ooley (50:11)
Right. So, obviously, I'm sure you get this a lot. Christina, how can we just legalize it? We're basically, by legalizing it, we're saying we approve of their behavior. We're endorsing the fact that they use drugs. How can we do that? This is something that's, it's a sin, it's wrong, it's, you you should be a good steward of your body and the body that God gave you. How can we tolerate that sort of behavior?

What do you say to that sort of objection?

Christina Dent (50:42)
think we have not spent a lot of time thinking through all of the negative behaviors, harmful behaviors, destructive behaviors that are already legal and that people are not lobbying to have made illegal. ⁓ If you are ⁓ a Christian, you can think about the Ten Commandments. There's only two of those that are ⁓ sort of patently, criminally, you know, illegal, murder and theft. But we aren't arresting people.

for coveting. We aren't arresting people for taking the Lord's name in vain. And even the most ardent supporters ⁓ of kind of a ⁓ tough approach to behavior, I just haven't heard a lot of people saying that we should be criminalizing all sin because, I mean, there wouldn't be anybody to guard the prisons. We would all be in it then ⁓ if you're a person of faith. So we already recognize that the criminal justice system is not the right tool.

to handle all sin because we haven't even taken the 10 commandments, much less all the other things that you can do and turn those into criminal law. And we recognize that's not the right approach. So what about just harmful behavior? Well, again, there's all sorts of harmful behavior that you can engage in legally. You can smoke cigarettes. We absolutely know that that is likely to kill you if you do that for a long time. And yet we allow people to do that. Now,

Interestingly, we have been able to significantly reduce the amount of people smoking cigarettes, not by arresting them, but by educating them and by holding companies accountable and making sure that ⁓ what is on the market has labeled with warnings and there's age gates on it. These are all things you can't do in an underground market, by the way. You can buy heroin when you're 13 and you can't buy a cigarette until you're 21 now.

That's worth thinking about that this is the model that we have set up that heroin is completely unregulated. It's a free for all in the underground market. No regulation, no quality control, no age gates. And yet for tobacco and alcohol, we have regulation, we have proper labeling, we have age gates. The only way to gain regulatory ability is through allowing something to be sold legally. So

I am not ⁓ encouraging my children to go commit adultery just because I don't think they should be arrested if they do. It is my job as a parent and it's our job as institutions and communities to teach wise behavior, healthy behavior, but arresting someone just because they do something that we don't like or that we think is unhealthy for them, it just is not a great solution. It doesn't really

work. I mean, if we look at the number of people who are using illegal drugs today, that's doubled in the last 20 years in the US. Like, we're not almost winning. It's not like we have almost won if we just hang on a bit longer. ⁓ It's going in the other direction. It's getting, yes, yes. And so that's not the that's not going to work for us. And we can look at the root causes and see why that is that punishment wouldn't work for something made worse by punishment.

Alex Ooley (53:41)
or just do it a little bit ⁓ harder, right?

Christina Dent (53:55)
So I don't think about it that way at all, although I spent most of my life thinking about it that way, thinking, wait a second, this is gonna make people think it's okay to use drugs. ⁓ No, it's not. We have lots of ways of teaching and modeling and encouraging behavior. You think about something like insurance rates with smoking. That's one way that we encourage healthy behavior. You get a better insurance rate if you don't smoke than if you do.

It's harder to find restaurants or places that you can smoke indoors. Now it's not that we arrested people for smoking. We have used social pressure and incentives to encourage more people not to smoke alongside honest education. And a lot more people have stopped smoking. It's, it's amazing. ⁓ so there are, there are so many ways to teach that are not related to just saying, well, we're going to arrest you.

Alex Ooley (54:45)
Ha ha.

Christina Dent (54:51)
if you do it. mean, if there's anything we know about teenagers is that they tend to like to do things that they're told not to do. ⁓ So I'm not convinced that we're not making it worse for teenagers by taking this approach of be afraid, don't do it. Here are the police teaching you about it. And I wonder what would happen if we said, here's a nurse that's going to come and teach you about substances and they're going to explain what they do to your body. The difference between depressants and

⁓ stimulants and the potential for harm, the potential for addiction and explain it to you as this is a health concern that could destroy your health and potentially kill you depending on how much of this you take instead of this kind of fear approach of the police are coming and they might come and arrest you if you use it. ⁓ I was doing a presentation at a college, one of our state universities, had a like a

club there and I went to go present to them and after I did the presentation one of the I went around the room and had all the students give kind of 30 seconds of what they thought of these ideas and one of the guys said you know this is this is really interesting because ⁓ when I was in school and they came and did the drug education talk all of my friends and I met at the vending machines afterwards and we're like we have got to get our hands on this stuff this just sounds like

Alex Ooley (56:12)
Yeah. ⁓

Christina Dent (56:16)
We are curious now. So there's some level that we know D.A.R.E. was not effective and in some ways encouraged more people use drugs after going through D.A.R.E. in some instances than stayed away from it. ⁓ And there's better ways to encourage behavior and discourage behavior than using the criminal justice system. It should not be our default tool for teaching.

Alex Ooley (56:39)
Yeah. And to the person who says we can't legalize this because it's bad, I struggled with this ⁓ through high school and in college, thinking about these sorts of issues is that there's, I think for a lot of people, it helps to realize that there's this major distinction or chasm between law and morality and that just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's immoral and just because it's immoral doesn't mean it should be illegal. ⁓ For instance,

Driving above the speed limit is illegal, but there's nothing inherently immoral about it ⁓ Versus like you said you alluded to adultery. It's immoral, but it's not illegal and part of that I think it's I'd like to get your thoughts on this And I know we're coming up close to an hour here. So ⁓ we'll try to close up here soon, but ⁓ Part of it goes back to this

victimless crime and lots of people will say, well, drug use is not a victimless crime, but there's nobody who's directly harmed. unlike murder, unlike theft, unlike battery, where there's a direct harm, where there's a victim of the crime and there's somebody who can call the police about the crime, a drug like, or a crime like drug possession does not have that direct victim.

And so I think another unintended consequence of this is that it breaks down trust in society and trust in the police, because what do you have to do to police crimes like drug crimes? You have to take a more invasive approach to it. You have to engage in more roadside stops. You have to engage in more searches of homes. You have to engage in controlled buys or using confidential informants.

⁓ and people, think have a, develop a lack of trust, not only in other people because they may be snitches, but they also develop a lack of trust in police because they have an incentive to try to suss out these sorts of things, ⁓ through more intrusive, ⁓ investigative tactics. So there, there are tons of unintended consequences to, of ⁓ trying to police.

Christina Dent (58:55)
Yeah.

Alex Ooley (59:02)
of victimless crimes in addition to all the other ones that we've already talked about. And I've got a list of 30 or 40 here. There's no way we could get to them in this podcast. ⁓ But you talk about this in the book a lot that drug laws may have started with good intentions, but you can't judge the policy based on its intentions. You have to judge it based on its outcomes. And the outcome has been a disaster.

Christina Dent (59:31)
Yep, absolutely. And I think that's a big, ⁓ it is a warning to us today as we think about how do we respond to fentanyl? How do we respond to ⁓ new drugs coming in the market like 7-OH, like kratom? ⁓ We have an opportunity to take a different path than we've taken in the past where we don't just go with this knee-jerk reaction to, hey, there's something, it could be harmful, let's ban it.

and just send it into that underground market. ⁓ The people who are winning there are people who are part of gangs, cartels, terrorist organizations who are making money off of selling all of these drugs. They would love to have more drugs that are in their purview. But your point, I love your point that you just made on kind of the victimless crime. it's my experience too that people will immediately say, this is not a victimless crime. There are lots of people. What about the children who are hurt? What about...

And again, I would say where there are parents who are abusing or neglecting children, they absolutely should be held accountable, whether that's through the foster care system, through the criminal justice system, depending on what it is that's happening there. That's where a victim comes in and we have laws against that, yes. And the arrest does not happen because the person was in possession of a drug. It happens because they were abusing a child. That's what they're arrested under. So a drug possession,

Alex Ooley (1:00:41)
That's a crime.

Christina Dent (1:00:56)
crime going away doesn't mean we have no mechanism to hold people accountable. We can hold them accountable with all the other laws against harming people that we already have. But let's say that we cannot get someone on our side, Alex, just because ⁓ let's say we have not convinced them already. I would encourage them to think about, even if you think drug possession should be a crime, would you rather law enforcement spend their time and resources

Finding people, to your point, you gotta go find them because they're not reporting themselves needing to be arrested. And about 10 % of the US population of adults uses illegal drugs regularly. So you've got a one in 10 shot if you just start randomly stopping people to find someone who's in possession of a drug. Violent crimes, meanwhile.

have about a 50 % clearance rate. Clearance meaning there's some sort of arrest made. That doesn't even necessarily mean they are ⁓ convicted. Just something happens other than the crime, that there's some sort of arrest made. So you've got people, families of murder victims, you've got people who have been raped, people who have been assaulted. There has never been an arrest made in their case. And yet we have loads and loads, millions of people

who are going to prison and jail over drug possession charges or small nonviolent drug charges. Even if you just weigh which one is actually going to make us into a safer community and where is justice going to be had with the limited resources that we have in the system, could we at least agree that we shouldn't be arresting people for possession until we're solving all of those cases? And for most people, it never gets close to that.

And that is, that's a tragedy because those are, those are victim crimes. There are victims waiting for justice and about 50 % of them will never find it. And meanwhile, we're still arresting people for possession. On, on that alone, I think we can say, let's, let's shift, let's shift the use of those resources. We need far more people getting justice than are getting it today.

Alex Ooley (1:03:14)
And I think that that's actually, it's been a while since I looked at the data, so I could be wrong on this, but I think 50 % is generous. I think that's ⁓ maybe 50 % of reported crimes because I think it's actually, if you include all the crimes that are not even reported, I think it's closer to upper 30s and low 40 percentile range in terms of clearance rates on ⁓ crimes with a direct victim. ⁓

Christina Dent (1:03:40)
Mm-hmm. And if you get into,

you, you know, that's a, I'm taking an average there. So, you know, you get clearance rates that are higher for murder, but if you have theft or carjacking or something like that, your odds of being arrested for that, if you commit it, are very, very low. I mean, the risk you're taking is pretty low to commit a crime like that. That's a terrifying crime. And yet we have very little ability to hold people accountable for.

terrifying crimes that they're committing against people in their community. Just what the numbers say of the number of people actually being arrested in those situations. And yet we are continuing to stop and search and break into people's homes with no knock raids and search. ⁓ It is all upside down and we're getting less justice and more harm. And I think we just haven't stopped to think about some of those collateral consequences and the way that we could better fix that.

Alex Ooley (1:04:34)
Yeah. Well, Christina, we're just a little bit over an hour now and I don't want to take up too much of your time. You've been very generous with your time already. But I'd like to close with getting a few thoughts from you about what are some ways that people can help their loved ones if they know, if they have loved ones or know people who have loved ones who are struggling with addiction. And then what resources would you direct people to? Obviously we've talked about End It For Good and your book.

link to those of course but if you have if want to talk about those a little bit more and any other resources that you'd recommend please please take the time to do that.

Christina Dent (1:05:10)
If you have a loved one or yeah, it doesn't have to be somebody in your family. Maybe it's a friend that you love who's struggling with an addiction. ⁓ Highly recommend reading the book Beyond Addiction. ⁓ The subtitle is How Science and Kindness Help People Heal. Highly recommend that book. There is a program called Invitation to Change. You can get it online. You can access it anywhere in the world, I think. ⁓ And it teaches you ⁓

ways of communication and engagement that have been proven to increase the likelihood that your loved one will get help. So Invitation to Change is one of those. There's a program called CRAFT. It's a method really, community reinforcement and family training. There are therapists all around the country who are trained in CRAFT and some of them run support groups for loved ones of people struggling with an addiction. And you may be saying to yourself, there's Al-Anon, just go to Al-Anon, it's everywhere.

Yes, there is, but this is a little bit of a different approach. I heard someone describe it as, Al-Anon taught them how to ⁓ separate from their loved one and kind of keep themselves healthy. And Kraft taught them how to engage with their loved one. Still keeping themselves healthy, but being able to have a relationship with them and actually ⁓ be part of that healing journey and not have to just kind of cut off ⁓ relationship with them.

And we know from the research now that these programs are actually helping more people make a choice to get help. So if you're a reader, read Beyond Addiction. If you want to look into, if you're willing to put some time and effort into learning, look into Invitation to Change or CRAFT. We'd love to have you join us at End It for Good. The most important thing I think a family member could do if they just feel like I can't do anything else, I am so stretched thin, is to not lose hope and to not give up.

⁓ and to celebrate any small changes for good in their loved one's life. Don't make it where they have to hit perfection before they feel encouragement. ⁓ Human behavior is incredibly difficult to change. Addiction is really difficult to overcome. If we can celebrate small wins, we can help people ⁓ make the changes over time in a way that is maybe far more sustainable to them than trying to make this all or nothing jump to immediate sobriety one day.

⁓ So we would love to have you come find us on social media at end it for good. ⁓ You can come to end it for good.com hop on our newsletter. I send out commentary in that on whatever's happening in the world and our thoughts about that related to drugs and addiction. You can get a copy of curious there, all the things we've got a podcast also where we talk about all of these things we have guests on to come and bring us different perspectives and stories of recovery and parents who are sharing what they wish they had known.

before they lost a child to overdose, trying to really just give people a broad understanding of all the different ways that this impacts us and all the different ways that we can potentially find better solutions because almost all of us are impacted by addiction in our families. We're all impacted by the war on drugs, but almost all of us now are impacted by addiction in our families. And so for all of us trying to lean in and learn instead of just push it to the side,

is going to be really helpful as we try to address this addiction epidemic. We are a world that is hurting, that have a lot of people who are struggling to stay present in their own lives. And it's not going to stop overnight, but we can begin to learn and to have some compassion and to begin to find solutions that work better.

Alex Ooley (1:08:54)
Well, thank you so much, Christina. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast and have this discussion, incredibly important discussion, one that's close to my heart and my work day to day. I'm incredibly passionate about this subject. We should have mentioned this earlier in the podcast, but we alluded to it a little bit that the best way to reach people is to sort of spark curiosity or plant a seed, not to just batter them with

facts and evidence and you know that sort of thing but to let them reach the conclusion on their own ⁓ and I think that your book gives people a lot of ⁓ sort of fodder for to spark that discussion to open that dialogue and to help make other people curious so ⁓ thank you for writing your book I know it could not have been a small undertaking and for all the work that you continue to do.

Christina Dent (1:09:52)
Thanks so much, Alex.

Alex Ooley (1:09:54)
Well thanks everybody for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, don't forget to give us a like and subscribe to help us spread the message of freedom. As always, you can find the episodes on YouTube, Rumble, Facebook, X at Forge of Freedom. And you can also find us on all the most popular podcast streaming platforms and at forgeoffreedom.com. Until next time everybody, remember you are the Forge of Freedom.